A Woman Clothed in Words (13 page)

There was a sort of rhythmical soft roar going on which never stopped and never got any louder. Where there is sound there must be life, and he boldly marched up and down looking for the source of the noise; perhaps you couldn’t really call it a noise, it wasn’t loud enough for that.

He couldn’t see a soul in the streets, and so he began to try the doorknobs of the houses. Quite pretty houses they were too, all the doors painted bright colours which contrasted well with the grey stone of the walls. No two doors were exactly the same colour, but in one way they were all alike. They were all locked tight and bolted. There was no way at all to enter those houses. If they had the power of speech all the doors would have said the same thing – keep out, keep out.

To have come so far for nothing seemed ridiculous. If he turned tail and went home what would he tell his mother? No doubt she would by this time have let out his room to a lodger, some quiet man of her own age who ate everything put before him without complaint and whose light moustache was stained at the edges with the strong tea which she brewed for him three times a day.

There was nothing for it but to search around for a ladder, for he wanted at least to take a look in at the windows and see what or who lived in those neat forbidding little houses. Once up to the height of the lowest panes he could look inside, and what did he see? All the people were asleep, the parents in their beds, the children in their cribs, the grandfathers nodding in their rocking chairs. The noise he could hear was from the snores of all these people. not only the men and women and children, but all the dogs and cats were snoozing. Every easy chair, every cushion, every hearthrug had its dozing pet, gently snoring away. Perhaps in the back gardens mice and ants and small striped snakes were softly snoring too? Who knows?

All this annoyed Zandor. What a lazy lot! Didn’t they have anything better to do than snore their lives away? He would soon put an end to this apparently endless napping.

He took his ladder under his arm and walked until he found a church. A church with a convenient belltower. There he climbed into the steeple and untied the bell ropes and began to pull them with all his might. For a few minutes nothing at all happened, then the bells began to peal. What a terrible noise they made for Zandor had no notion at all about bell-ringing, of how it has its own musical rules; the words “ringing
the changes” meant nothing to him. But the noise woke the people, and the people woke the dogs, and the dogs barked and woke all the babies, who howled for food and care. And that’s all there is to the story. Or nearly all.

There remains the arrogance of Zandor, a young man who believes he is not so much the awakener of the city but its creator. This is my city, he tells himself, and anyone else who will listen. This is my city and I made it, for didn’t it remain for years and years sleeping in my mind until I brought it to reality? Here it is: the people driving up and down the streets, the children playing in the little gardens out back of the houses. the birds chirping in the trees, the snakes squiggling in the grass.

I am who I am,
these last words spoken aloud by Laurence have thickened the dark woolly air and no-one can hear any more of the story. It is sewn up into a bag of black felt that will never be opened to let out the stuffing, perhaps straw, perhaps sawdust. Nothing more can be done about this. Laurence is “out” like in a parlour game. Knowing is to forget what unknowing was. If there’s ever another story then Boy or Brythyll must tell it, must think it out, must thrust it out into the minds of the others.

No-one says any of this, they simply wait there in the dark for Laurence the storyteller to disappear. Will or can Laurence the listener remain? He decides not. Ascends into the dull night and a voice that is not a voice takes up the book that is not a book and begins to read.

Once, Nan begins, and the others imagine her voice, a thin voice still piping from babyhood, once, and then she stops as if a gate had shut in her mind. Once, once, once. Then silence, in which the other two allow the world to fall. It falls as though there was no end to falling, as though falling was all there was on this earth. Or in this earth, their cave, their underworld. Blank, blank, blank in the darkness. Then even the darkness disappears and there is nothing.

Silence can only be measured at its end. At its end the silence has been long. Has anyone breathed during that long quiet? Tie it, space it, tie it. The midwife times the clips between the ties and lets the cord drop into the future. Once, begins Nancy again, before I ever opened my eyes, before I ever saw you for the first time, I lived in the darkness between two worlds and while I was waiting to come to you there were stories and they all began the same way and ended the same way but the middles were quite different.

Now and then the Old Woman took my hand and let me feel in her basket. What was in there? Once a hen and once a horse, once a stone and once a needle and once a cup and once a bun of bread. I could choose my own story and my fingers fiddled around in all these things until they closed around a dried spiny little fish and then I thought of the sea, though I can’t think how I imagined such a thing, bigger by far than the land and far deeper than the mountains are high.

The sea, you know, brings all sorts of things to the shore and leaves them lying about on the sand. Some are weeds and some are empty shells and some are whales as big as churches. There are dead birds with wet feathers and live men stepping out of a fishing boat before they quite get to the beach. Heave ho, heave ho, they drag their boat up over the pebbles and the poor fish lying in the bottom leaping and squirming. I was standing on the shore and the last one to get out was a big boy standing up to his knees among the moving, shining fish and he was the one told me the story.

Once, she begins again, this time in the boy’s voice, the boy named Hallimor, or so they have been given to understand, and they can even see him sitting on the seawall, behind him the sea that multitude of human tears and above him the pearly sky, clear yet not clear for the sea breathes green water into the air and though we can see the sun and it shines down brightly yet it has no outline. There is no place where the sun is not but where it actually ends no-one knows, it bleeds its brilliant white into the sky. Once, says Hal, for they have decided to call him that for short, there was an island small and rocky with a few trees and a few houses, maybe three or four, and in one of those houses I was born and lived for the first four years of my life. Then I left and have never been back there, though sometimes as I sail the seas in my fishboat I think I see it especially if the mist fog is rising or the sun has set, but the island seems to sail away out of my sight as though I were an island and it was a boat. Shall I tell you then how I came to leave my home and why I can never return?

“Never is a very long time,” remarks Brythyll prissily. No-one has ever interrupted a story before. Silence cold and heavy greets her. Perhaps the spell is broken, perhaps they will never hear the end of it. But still the voice continues, the young man’s voice hidden under the shadow of the child’s:

Not so long ago, begins Hal once more, this time in an offhand kind of way as though this was not a story but a conversation, I met my island head-on as I was fishing with my skipper a little too far offshore to be safe. But first you should understand that I was born in a big house in the north where there are fells and lakes but few woods and spinneys and no forests at all. Aha, said Nan to herself, just like a big boy, they always think they can muzz your head so you don’t ask questions. Well, how long ago? she asks. Hal is silent for a moment, then, Do you want to hear this story or not? And he turns away. Yes, says Nan, tell me. And he does.

And this was the very same house where your people once lived. Grandmothers, grandfathers, great aunts and great, great aunts. And great great great ... as many greats as you can count on your fingers and more perhaps. As for me I was born in that house but not in that family. Do you want to hear how that came to be? Not particularly, I told him, but I expect you’ll tell me anyway. You’re lying, I said. And I remembered Grandfather, the music one, how he often says “with the best of intentions.” These are some of his favourite words. Like “Summer is over,” like “three four time.” He never says “three quarter time” like Father. How can I remember all this when Hal is the one telling the story and I’m not even born yet? Hal is saying those things about the ancestors because he wants to please me. I know better than to listen to someone who wants to please. Shut up Hal, and I almost lost the story. He was quiet for a long time.

Well, in this house, he continues, there were ten rooms, large rooms with bluestone floors and painted plaster walls. Nine of these rooms were occupied, not with people but with boats. Little fishboats you might say when they were tossing on the sea, but large boats if you saw them cooped up in a house. You’d wonder how they ever got into the rooms. But there are ways with these shore houses, I can tell you that, ways of getting them in there and ways of getting them out when they are needed, just as there is a way to float a boat from a beach when there’s no dock handy, and ways of pulling it up on the sand so that the high tide won’t take it out to blue water where it’d fill up with salt waves and be lost to its master forever.

Why don’t you ask me about the tenth room? Well that’s where the family lived pressed down like herrings in a barrel. Ten of them. The same number as the boats. Now Grandpa’s boat was the best of them, painted green and white and the name of this boat was
Ivy.
I could tell you the story of
Ivy,
or I could name all the boats and the colours and their owners first and go back to the beginning later, so choose which and hurry up about it. I haven’t got a hundred years, even if you have.

Nan

When you lean out of the upstairs window on a summer night the velvet dark touches your face softly, softly. It is the very colour of the smallest tadpoles that you remember from spring. Later the tadpoles got browner and browner until they were tiny mottled froglets. They had forgotten how to wriggle so they hopped; they hopped away into the grass and you forgot them for the love of moths and huge junebugs flying through the night. Flying through the open window and falling on the bedroom floor where Julius the white kitten hunts them and you have to bravely pick them up and throw them back into the soft warm night which waits out there in the garden. It is Grandfather’s garden, the music one. He’s the one planted all the plants long ago and now they are flowers, lilies and peonies and daisies.

And you shall climb over the sill and leap into the night and land softly in the dark grass and then down to the canal bank where grandfather has sworn you will hear the nightingale singing, burbling he says in the trees that hang down over the water. You never can see them, he says, but their song must mean they are there. If you can hear something but you can’t see it, it’s still a noun grandfather says, but really shouldn’t there be another sort of noun quite separate for things that are there but you can’t see? But what if you just can’t see them for the moment, like the Atlantic Ocean or the Tower of London? Can a noun be one sort one day and the other kind another day? Someone has to decide that. Perhaps God?

NAN – When is a noun not a noun?

GOD – I can’t answer that.

GRANDFATHER – Neither can I.

NAN – Give up?

GOD – I never give up.

GRANDFATHER – I do. When is a noun not a noun?

NAN – How do I know. Anyway, I asked you first.

And so on. There doesn’t have to be an answer for every little thing. Question and Answer: Question and Answer: All Grandfather’s test papers are like that. Laurence says it’s time for Nan to do essays, little ones in big writing perhaps. Grandfather says, let her learn to put sentences together first, not the cart before the horse. Nan wonders was the cart invented before the horse? Was it waiting there for the horse to be invented? God invented the horse, Laurence explains, it took a long time, like a million years or so.

God is a slow inventor. But the cart is a manmade object.

Nan stops thinking and kicks her legs about. Her dance makes a bumping noise on the wooden floor. Somehow she has got back into the house without even hearing the nightingales sing. She remembers the other house, the tall house in London. Almost in the city: Number Eleven, Nightingale Lane. She remembers her bed there, a small bed with brass rails. She remembers falling down the stairs. She cried but it didn’t hurt much really. She was a very little girl at the time.

~~~

Brythyll at Easter Goes to the Church and Leaves Boy Outside in the Pushchair to Read

The dark of the church reminds Bryll of water. This is what she wants to tell him when she finds him at last in his own lair. She had thought she was a hound chasing a rabbit, but that won’t do. This place is a cold lake, and she is swimming in it. She’s a trout after a minnow, or a minnow about to swallow a pike. This is what she keeps trying to remember. She must not forget the questions, the request. She must not let the smell of him, so glowing and near, distract her from asking.

Where am I now? she’ll say, and where is it, where is the island you promised me? You said we’d live on an island far from the world, but it was just a room with a garden. I want the island. I want you to take me away. No-one will find us, no-one who can’t swim, that is. And there they are, Laurence and Boy and Nan swimming strongly, rhythmically through and over the water to the island of her mind.